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The Balanchine centennial.

This year is the centenary of George Balanchine’s birth, and, in recognition, his company, New York City Ballet, staged a two-season festival, “Balanchine 100: The Centennial Celebration,” which ran from November through last week. In fact, these two seasons were basically just regular N.Y.C.B. seasons, repackaged as a tribute. The winter season, called “Heritage,” had to do with Balanchine’s Russian and European roots, so that’s when the company danced the older ballets, his own and those he learned from. The spring season, entitled “Vision,” was a tribute to what he created for City Ballet, thus making room for later ballets, his own and those he influenced.

In honor of Balanchine’s musical choices, the spring season was subdivided into an American Music Festival, a Russian Music Festival, and a European Music Festival, the last of which was then broken down into a German night, an Austrian night, and French, Italian, and British nights, with appropriate cultural legates giving us curtain speeches about Balanchine’s greatness. On Balanchine’s birthday, January 22nd, there was an onstage party, with a cake and balloons. There was also an alumni night, with veteran N.Y.C.B. dancers rising in the audience to be applauded. The spring gala included guests from all of Lincoln Center’s theatres. Plácido Domingo sang; Wynton Marsalis blew his horn. The gala’s m.c. was Sarah Jessica Parker, who, though she has no connection with Lincoln Center or Balanchine, is a big star.

But, once the smoke cleared from the altars, it was obvious that the one tribute City Ballet owes Balanchine, that of dancing his ballets competently, is not being paid. What was true at the company’s previous Balanchine festival, in 1993 (the tenth anniversary of his death), is no less true today. The company can still perform well, at times brilliantly, in Balanchine’s story ballets and character ballets, pieces where the dancers have a drama or at least a theme to latch onto. What they cannot manage is his pure-dance ballets—that is, the ballets that were the focus of his career and his chief contribution to twentieth-century art. Balanchine was a Platonist. Of his “Liebeslieder Walzer,” where the four couples dance first in a drawing room, then in a garden, he said that the first part took place in the world, the second part in the soul. That could be said of others of his ballets, too, but often he just went straight to the soul—the abstract. His “Theme and Variations,” it has been said, is a distillation of “The Sleeping Beauty”; his “Diamonds” a précis of “Swan Lake.” In those ballets, there are traces of the narrative source. Elsewhere, there are no hints. Looking at “Concerto Barocco” or “Le Tombeau de Couperin,” you just knew what they were about—mostly, the ennoblement of feeling by form. The bodies were the feeling; the music was the form. Out came the dancing, the soul and the world in one.

Or that’s what you used to see. Today, in large measure, it is gone. For years in the eighties and nineties, Peter Martins cast Heather Watts, his former girlfriend, as the lead woman in “Concerto Barocco” and “Apollo,” that other great distillation. She wiped them clean of meaning. Today, he has another dancer, Yvonne Borree, doing that duty. In the winter season, Borree led most of the “Apollo”s and “Barocco”s, and these two ballets, arguably Balanchine’s greatest, emerged looking utterly hollow. The N.Y.C.B. audience, or its newer members, must have said to themselves, “Why all the fuss about Balanchine?” Is that the message that the company, tributes notwithstanding, is trying to put out? I noticed that at the spring gala, which was being televised—that is, saved for all time—Borree suddenly came to life, and put in a fiery performance. So did Maria Kowroski, a dancer of huge potential who in the winter season had cast the don’t-look-for-anything-here spell on “Diamonds.” What are these people thinking when the TV cameras haven’t awakened their pride? “Don’t try so hard”? That’s what it looks like.

Some critics have said that Martins’s failure is in the development of the dancers’ personalities. This is certainly a problem at City Ballet. You don’t see a lot of souls on that stage, and when you do they tend to belong to the older dancers, such as Peter Boal and Kyra Nichols. But I think that this problem should not be separated from the company’s technical problems. Most ballet dancers don’t go to college. Ballet class is their college, the place where, as in Art 101, they learn about achievement and difficulty, humility and struggle—matters of the soul. Since Peter Martins took over, in 1983, the company’s technical level has steadily declined. Balanchine’s ballets are now too hard for them. Other writers have said this, and Martins has steadfastly denied it.“The steps are there,” he recently told the Washington Post. If so, what happened to the double air turn-arabesques to four points—north, south, east, west—when Nilas Martins did “Scotch Symphony” in January? Where were the back-travelling sautés développés in Joaquin de Luz’s rendering of Oberon’s big solo in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”? When Robert Tewsley, in a performance of “Theme and Variations,” was faced with having to do the famous double air turn-pirouette combination, he just about gave up in the middle. To fumble these steps is like cracking on high C.

When Balanchine died, he left Peter Martins a double legacy: first, a peerless repertory—no other company in the world can match it—and, second, a shoes-to-fill problem on the order of the Kennedy-Johnson succession. To maintain those ballets, so demanding of body and mind, would require a commitment, an idealism, comparable to Balanchine’s. But, from the very beginning, Martins, in his choreography, showed a temperament quite different from Balanchine’s: dry, iconoclastic. Soon after he took over, the Balanchine ballets started to blur. Critics complained. Martins went on the defensive, and much of his stewardship of the company since then can be seen as a digging in of the heels.

That includes the centennial celebration. Look at the ballets that Martins commissioned for this tribute to his predecessor. One, “Double Feature,” by the musical-comedy director/choreographer Susan Stroman, was good, or the first part of it was: a Cinderella story based on silent-movie tearjerkers, set to an orchestration of Irving Berlin songs, and demonstrating all of Stroman’s happy mastery of old theatrical conventions. The cast glowed, and Ashley Bouder, as the Cinderella figure, showed that there actually are some young dancers at N.Y.C.B. who can get their legs up. The piece was a curious contribution to a ballet festival, since Stroman seems to know only about six or seven ballet steps, but Martins bluntly told the Times that he commissioned “Double Feature” so that he could sell some tickets—Stroman is the hottest director on Broadway—and at least it gave the audience some fun.

Which one would have looked for in vain among the new ballets of the spring season. Here we got two ballets from Martins himself. One, “Chichester Psalms,” to Leonard Bernstein’s cantata, was a soupy antiwar number. The other, “Eros Piano,” to a score by John Adams, was the more typical Martins product: deadpan. In much of his work, Martins avoids having a central pas de deux (the core of meaning in most ballets) by converting his twosome into a threesome. And, whatever the arrangement, he tends to disable the woman by overpartnering. She barely gets to move on her own. Here we saw all that again. Alexandra Ansanelli and Ashley Laracey were laid across Nikolaj Hübbe’s lap, hauled to his shoulder, smeared across his body. In between, they took a rest in the wings or, at one point, lay face down on the linoleum awaiting their next turn. Female ballet dancing was the center of Balanchine’s work. For a long time now, it has been strange to see Martins’s prostrate women on City Ballet’s stage, but it has never looked weirder than at a Balanchine festival.

The spring season also included a big ballet, “Shambards,” by Christopher Wheeldon, to a score by the prominent Scottish composer James MacMillan. Since 2001, Wheeldon has been N.Y.C.B.’s resident choreographer—a hire that won Martins a lot of praise, for Wheeldon is very gifted. Nevertheless, he, too, goes in for overpartnering, and in the duets he created for Miranda Weese and Jock Soto in “Shambards” he outdid himself in this regard, carrying the pushing and pulling to the point where Weese’s character actually died. You couldn’t believe it, but there she was, inert on the floor, with her tutu in her face. Soto then grabbed one of her arms and dragged her away. (Martins also once made a ballet, the 1988 “Tanzspiel,” in which the woman was ostensibly killed in the course of the pas de deux.) With overpartnering, one hesitates to assign political meaning. Maybe these choreographers don’t really mean to insult women. But, once the woman is dead, it’s hard not to see her as ill-used. In “Shambards,” the murder had a thematic context. MacMillan’s score was inspired by an angry poem that Edwin Muir wrote about Scottish culture, and the music, too, is angry about Scotland: Highland tunes keep cropping up, only to be curdled in dissonance. O.K., but all of that is subtext. What you saw on the stage—again, in the course of a festival dedicated to Balanchine, Mr. Ballet-Is-Woman—was a woman being mauled to death.

The final insult was saved for the end of the season: Boris Eifman’s “Musagète,” a dance essay on Balanchine’s life, set mainly to selections from Bach and Tchaikovsky. To New Yorkers, Eifman is the best known of the post-glasnost Russian choreographers—indeed, the only one they know. Since 1998, he has been showing his lurid, sentimental work in regular seasons at City Center. “Musagète,” which takes its name from the original title of Balanchine’s “Apollo” (“Apollon Musagète,” or “Apollo, Leader of the Muses”), is directly in line with what he has shown us before. Balanchine, we are to understand, was a tortured artist. He had passionate loves—enter the “muses”—but they all went wrong, and one went very wrong. At this point, we see Tanaquil LeClercq, Balanchine’s last wife, being stricken with polio, as she was in real life, at the age of twenty-seven. Alexandra Ansanelli, playing LeClercq to Robert Tewsley’s Balanchine, cramps up grotesquely; her feet hang like blobs. Eventually, she is dragged offstage, presumably dead, like Weese in “Shambards.” Actually, LeClercq lived, partially paralyzed, to the age of seventy-one. She died in 2000 and therefore, mercifully, will not see Eifman’s ballet. But forget the bad-taste problem. What about the snap of the fingers with which our hero turns life’s tragedies into art’s sublimities? And what about the silly, leg-flinging dances that are offered as those sublimities? Susan Stroman at least doesn’t pretend to be a ballet choreographer. Eifman does. I don’t blame him, though. He is just an ordinary schlockmeister. I blame Martins. This ballet is a direct slap in Balanchine’s face.

For the most part, Balanchine’s kind of dancing—that speedy, objective, fire-and-ice movement theatre—is now gone from New York. Last month, American Ballet Theatre, the company that dances across the plaza from N.Y.C.B. and is always contrasted with it (corny A.B.T. versus cool N.Y.C.B.), put on its own Balanchine celebration. It wasn’t two seasons; it was just one program—“Theme and Variations,” “Mozartiana,” “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux,” and “Ballet Imperial”—and it was a thrill. Veronika Part and Nina Ananiashvili overplayed the sorrows of “Mozartiana,” but both of them, and especially Ananiashvili, treated the ballet as a gift, something, they seemed to say, that they had waited their whole lives for. Herman Cornejo, in “Mozartiana” ’s gigue, got the tone a little wrong, thought the role was a character, but, oh, the wit and elegance—the sheer, dancing joy—that that thought inspired in him. These people can’t help being narrative. Like most of A.B.T.’s principal dancers, they are Russian or Latin, and that’s how Russian and Latin teachers tell their students to dance. They also tell them to be frontal, self-presentational—to act like stars—which is a way of performing that Balanchine did everything to discourage in his own company, but which flourishes at A.B.T. So the members of A.B.T. didn’t dance Balanchine exactly the way Balanchine wanted. They just danced it beautifully, with conviction and pride. To them, his work was a show, and so they made it one.

As for the City Ballet dancers, they—or their rehearsal directors—don’t seem to think Balanchine is a show. On the evidence of the performances, they think he’s a millstone around their necks, a standard they’re always being asked to come up to, without ever being told how. And that’s because their boss can’t tell them. ♦